Remember Those Empty Seats At The Olympics? Redditors Filled Them With A Delightful, Photoshopped Meme Audience

While the 2012 Olympics have brought us such inspiring photos of athletes pushing themselves to their absolute physical limits and crying in happiness or despair when the final scores are announced, there’s another photograph that hit me just as hard. It was shocking just how empty the seats were at these supposedly “sold out” shows. BuzzFeed attempted to purchase spots only for the seats to cost upwards of ₤450 or for the tickets to mysteriously disappear.

So for a few days, it seemed as if those seats would be Forever Alone, sitting mournful and unfilled while the events continued on without them. Until Reddit decided to step in. What started as a joke on r/photoshopbattles — inserting Sad Keanu alongside the basketball team — became a quest to cram in every recognizable celebrity, meme, or image macro. Just from a glance, you’ve got the Beatles, Strutting Leo, Admiral Ackbar, Where’s Waldo, Overly Attached Girlfriend, and plenty of sports memes like the guy who would hold up a giant poster of his face at basketball games.

Here’s the final .gif result. Love, love it.

It’s really fun to work your way backwards now and read through the thread, watching the image evolve with each addition and what various Redditors thought was funny, classy, or terrifying enough. See? This is the kind of patriotism that every Olympic games should bring out.